The business environment in marketing is rapidly changing. Legacy one-to-many marketing such as broadcast and newspaper advertisements and outdoor signage are losing ground to more targeted advertising, less granular segmentation, and even personalized messages. In order to be effective, personalization requires personal information from the users, in one form or another.
Personal information is typically related to a specific context a user is in. For example, if a person is interested in gardening, there might be personal information which contains a list of tools and plants owned or used by the individual, a diary how the individual's plants grow, what insects have been detected and so forth. This information can be stored, and the user may be likely to share the information with other people, especially people who are also interested in gardening. On the other hand, the same person may also have a strong interest in other areas, such as online gaming. Personal information related to this interest may also be stored, such as a logbook on bets, wins and losses, as well as credentials for different betting and gambling sites. Whereas a user may be willing to share the information related to gardening, the user is much less likely to want to share information related to gambling. Such information should be available only to gambling related contexts and, within that context, only to sites that really need it and that can process the information confidentially.
While different types of information naturally have different levels of sensitivity, it is also the case that the same information can have different levels of sensitivity in different contexts. For instance, disclosing the home address may be not sensitive in a context of participating a residential association, but more sensitive in a context of travelling.